Are you experiencing reduced staff motivation and dwindling productivity? If yes, then your company’s employee engagement might have taken a hit.
Thankfully, there are different employee management strategies that can help you turn things around.
This article covers 7 tips for improving employee engagement.
Since the modern workplace has seen many shifts and changes, there are practices you need to drop and policies you should start embracing.
The tips you’ll find here have been researched to be the best for 2024 and the modern workforce.
1. Organize Better Team Bonding Activities
Team-building activities offer workers an opportunity to get to know each other better and share their strengths, weaknesses, and interests. These activities remove any social roadblock that makes communication difficult among colleagues.
Team-building provides an environment that isn’t primarily focused on work. The exercise is more social and allows team members to show personality and express themselves more freely.
These kinds of environments allow the team to build trust and strengthen professional friendships. That way, they’re able to understand each other more and function as solid units.
What’s more, team-building activities show workers the names behind email addresses. They remind employees that they’re part of a group and put a face on the entire team.
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Types of Team-Building Activities
There are different types of team-building activities that you can organize to strengthen your team’s bond.
You can cut out time during meetings to solve puzzles, talk about your most annoying tasks, and make small talk with the rest of the team.
That said, you can run stand-alone activities without the shadow of work overhanging the event.
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Brain Teasers
Brain teasers require brainstorming and critical thinking. They’re engaging activities and also fun. You can use them to challenge the team and see how they work together.
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A Compliment Circle
Have team members compliment each other. It works by telling people to say what they admire the most about their team members.
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Play Games
Whether it’s board games, sports, or video games, you can engage in activities that help team members work together. You can organize a baseball game and divide the team into different teams to challenge each other.
2. Eliminate Payroll Issues
Research has shown that workers will likely leave an organization after two payroll issues.
Your employees are primarily working for you to get paid. They have bills to pay and other financial responsibilities to handle.
If they can’t take on those responsibilities, it starts to affect their work. They’ll be less focused on work and more preoccupied with personal challenges.
So, remove any reason to grumble at work due to delayed or incorrect payments.
Optimize your payroll process to ensure workers get paid on time without issues.
To do that, make sure you’re calculating their billable hours correctly if you pay by the hour. You should also automate your payroll to eliminate common human errors.
3. Eradicate Micromanagement
According to a Journal of Experimental Psychology study, workers who feel they’re always being watched record lower productivity levels.
It’s mostly natural for managers to want to be involved in everything from big project decisions to small procedures.
While your urge to make sure things go smoothly may come from a good place, it’s doing more harm than good
The general mood it instills is unhealthy for workers. Always dictating their every move strikes a sense of distrust not just in them but also in their abilities. It shows your workers that you’re not confident that they can do a good job without your input.
Micromanagement also stifles creativity, poisons the work environment, and hurts employee engagement.
So, you must take steps to eliminate micromanagement in its entirety. To do that, you have to put more faith in your workers and your delegation process.
One of the skills required for successful employee management is delegation. You have to know the right people to assign tasks without interfering.
If you want to feel more comfortable, make sure you outline your expectations for the job when you’re assigning it. Then, encourage workers to always update you when changes occur. For example, you should be notified if they need more time to complete the task.
4. Adopt More Public Recognition
Employee recognition is one way to make sure workers are encouraged to replicate great work. Don’t hesitate to appreciate workers and recognize their efforts when they make notable contributions and achieve impressive milestones.
You can recognize employees by praising them in front of colleagues. You can do that during meetings or whenever you send company-wide briefs and circulars.
If the team achieves success on any major project, do well to announce the names of the contributors as well.
But public recognition shouldn’t be limited to internal company communication. You should also appreciate staff on your company’s social media channels and website.
Employees can also be recognized and rewarded through things like paid vacation, more time off, promotions, and awards.
5. Evaluate the Work Schedule
Employees will be happier if their work schedules favor a better work-life balance. So, review your current company policy on work attendance and adjust it to make your workers more comfortable.
Depending on your business model, you can integrate flexible working hours and hybrid work into your schedule. Workers can choose their hours as long as they meet deadlines and improve work quality.
Since the world is moving toward a virtual work environment, you can allow employees to work from home some days of the week. This way, they can save money and reduce stress since they don’t have to go through daily office commutes.
6. Reduce Burnout and Discourage Overwork
Overworked employees will do your business more harm than good. If your staff has too much workload, you’re increasing the likelihood of costly mistakes, lack of focus, and reduced performance.
If your workers aren’t always sharp, you’ll be hurting your work quality and risking your company’s reputation.
So, implement policies that discourage overwork.
To prevent burnout, use employee monitoring tools such as Traqq, to identify workers who are being overburdened and those that have logged more hours than they should.
You should also use these tools to evaluate how you distribute the workload. Each employee should be assigned tasks that reflect their pace and ability. Don’t allocate more jobs than they can handle.
What’s more, you can attach punitive measures to overwork to discourage workers from staying after hours. Make sure you refrain from telling employees to handle business calls after work and don’t pressure them into feeling they should be available at all times.
7. Support Mental and Physical Health
You will see a boost in employee engagement when you make efforts to improve their overall well-being.
An organization-wide wellness program is an effective way to boost employee engagement.
You can sponsor meditation classes and encourage workers to take days off and take care of their mental health. Identify workers who need these breaks especially when they have put in extra effort to get a particularly difficult project across the line.
Company outings and workout classes are other ways to enhance workers’ welfare. You can also consider offering gym subscriptions, lifestyle coaching, and nutrition subsidies to encourage wellness beyond the office.
Additionally, you should encourage healthy eating within the office by stocking the kitchen with healthy foods.
Wrapping Up
Remember that your employees are the life force of your business. How your organization meets its long- and short-term objectives largely depends on the level of staff engagement.
You’ll also be reducing turnover and the many downsides that come with it if your workers are engaged.
